Agrupamento de Escolas de Atouguia da BaleiaPORTUGAL

Background and Experience

Contact

Brief description on the School/Organisation:

Atouguia da Baleia's school is the leader of a group of 17 several ranked schools, counting with more than 1200 students. Situated in the west of Portugal, at about 80 km north of Lisbon. Economically the region is very active on fishing activities, canning industry and also agriculture. More recently the tourism has developed and now it is one of the major engines of the local economy.

Atouguia da Baleia school has clearly in its educative project inscribed as a main axe for the next years, the investment on developing the uses and appliances of the digital world and communications within the classrooms and learning opportunities for students, as well as in teachers training.

Activities and experience in the areas relevant for this project andSkills and/or expertise of key persons involved in this project:

Atouguia's school has some tradition in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) among the educative community and above all in its use inside the classroom and in learning and teaching dynamics. Recently we have established links with institutions of ICT research and development, in order to become more update on educational appliances. We have also have been invited and entered de ITEC program (Innovative Technologies for Engaging Classrooms), in the 5th level. That's a program involving 15 ministries of education across Europe, towards the designing the future classrooms, innovative teaching practices and gathering the contribute of a large range of interests in educational matter.

So, we can say that at the end we think we are an educational community that rather frequently uses mobile technology as a basis to the learning and teaching process in articulation with the global world and using and taking advantage of their learning situations.

Taking an effort to walk to the future classroom we've the recent support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation financing a project to build a Maths and Science Lab based on mobile and high-tech equipment as well as teachers' specific training. We also have been joining efforts with the global educational company "Promethean" (interactive education technology for schools) testing hardware and software for education in real classrooms.

The key persons involved in this project are those who are the most experienced on our institution in the matter of the new communication and information technologies (ICT) applied to education, also those who have a large experience as teachers and as coordinators of projects. The project coordinator is also very experienced in teacher training and she's also the local coordinator of new ICT for our groupment of schools. The students that will be envolved in the project wil be also proficient in the use of the technologies and its use in a classroom environment. As a symbol of the interest that this project has for our institution the board of direction and the headmaster himself are wanting to have a direct participation.